From Sales to the Top: How to Transition to the Corporate Side of Retail

Many young adults start their working lives in retail but do not seek career advancement in the industry. Ryan Beliveau, 31, a data and IT manager at a nonprofit in Boston, Massachusetts, started his post-grad career transitioning from his retail sales associate position to a corporate role. Following this career path is a great opportunity to make use of your retail experience and propel you into the working world.

Beliveau sat down with Monster and gave us the inside scoop on how to go from the sales floor to the top floor in retail.

Q: Why did you decide to work in retail?

I began my retail career at the age of 16 at a clothing store, Eddie Bauer, as a sales associate. I'm not exactly 100 percent sure why but at the time the mall seemed like the obvious choice to start my search. It was a place I frequented almost every weekend, so it perhaps it just seemed familiar.

Luckily, the first (and only) place I applied was interested and eventually hired me after just a few weeks.​​

Q: How many different retail locations have you worked at? How did your titles and duties change?

Over the next eight years I worked for four different retail companies, in five different cities. First job was sales associate. I learned the basics like how to man the cash register, answer questions from customers and perfect my folding technique (still in use to this day!).

Eventually the "answering questions from customers" had to turn into "selling to the customer." This meant learning the brand.

The best way to do that was to live it. In retail it's fairly easy because they give you a significant discount on their clothes so you can stock your wardrobe with every item, every season. You can see firsthand the quality of materials, the fit and the wear of the clothes because you are in them every day, all day.

When a customer later asks, "Will this shrink when I wash it?" you no longer reply, "No, I'm told it doesn't." You can say, "I have one in each color and with the pre-shrunk cotton I can assure you these will not shrink after you wash them."

Second job I went from sales associate to manager in training (MIT). Here my responsibilities increased to opening and closing the store, making the nightly deposit and occasionally making the schedule. I still had the other tasks, but they were now magnified because I carried the token keys to the store. When a customer would ask, "Can I speak to a manager?" I had to transform to “captain customer service.” It was my job to make sure that interaction was handled smoothly, typically in favor of the customer.

My next job was stock person. This was after needing more work-life balance as a full-time college student.

Q: When was your transition to the corporate side of retail?

After college, I pursued a role in human resources. I met the HR manager at a department store who was looking for an HR generalist, but wasn't ready to fill the role yet. She offered me a sales position until the HR job was ready.

Working in a department store on commission was a totally different animal than a specialty store. My earnings were tied to a percentage of my sales. If I didn't sell a certain amount, I would receive 'draw,' which is like an hourly wage.

This meant if I wanted to make any real money I had to sell like crazy, but I now encountered something that was lacking in the previous jobs, competition.

Before, no matter how much I sold to a customer, whether it was $1,000 sale or a $10 sale, I earned the same amount. Now, I was competing against three or four other people for that one big sale. Luckily, it was only for a few months. Shortly thereafter, the HR manager was ready and I was upstairs in my cube.

Q: How did you pursue opportunities on the corporate side?

Once I was comfortable in the HR role, I started to think about next steps. There were two paths in front of me. Stay in the retail side of the house and become an HR manager, then regional HR Manager and so on. Or, go to corporate and work on things like HR policy, systems or training.

I liked the idea of corporate because it offered consistency and a more structured career path. Consistency in the form of a 9-5 day, Monday through Friday and steady pay. Usually corporate gigs are salaried positions.

Beliveau didn’t end up taking the big corporate job because he would have needed to relocate but he understood the steps that would have gotten him there. He ended up leaving the retail HR job to pursue a corporate one with another company.

Q: What was your transition from customer service (floor) to corporate like?

​Going from the floor to the HR cube upstairs was an interesting transition because it meant that I now had to coach, manage [and] train my peers, peers that just a few weeks ago I was hanging out on the floor with.​ ​It's not that I was uncomfortable in that situation, but it made me feel like I was on proving ground, that I had to justify to them why I got to be behind the curtain and not them.

Specifically comparing my time on the floor to corporate, I knew how to handle myself in situations where I didn't know who I was speaking to, but I had to interact with them in a manner that made them comfortable and showed that I was listening to their needs. It didn't matter whether I was talking to another analyst or the senior vice president, I leveraged those skills I learned on the floor to provide the best customer service possible.

Just because you are no longer on the floor does that mean you are not servicing customers, they are just another kind. They are internal customers that are looking for you to help them by providing a specific skill.

Q: How did your corporate retail job help you in your current career?

I learned how to find my voice in a dialogue with my customer, how to carefully guide them on making a decision that affects the both us – whether it's add-on selling a pair of socks to go with those new shoes because you need to coordinate and I need to increase my UPT's (units per transaction) because my manager is worried about the numbers OR if I've presented an in-depth analysis with recommendations on a project and I need my boss to make a decision because it determines the speed of delivery to the customer and how much of my time is dedicated to this project over the next few months when I'm already working on three other projects.

​It also made me more patient as person. When someone walks through those doors in a whirlwind, picking up every item to try on, only to leave everything in the fitting room in a pile on the floor and not having bought a single item, I had to remain calm and collected and figure out how to get everything back out on the floor and still make a sale with a store full of customers.

You have to remain professional because your actions can leave an impression on that person's association with either that store, with you or with both. Same rings true for the corporate world.

In this ever-changing environment, having the ability to adjust to every new decision that is made with each new leader is important. You may have been working on a project for four months that no longer exists because the new leader says we are working toward a new goal. First reaction may be to freak out because you've spent backbreaking hours working on it and now it's been tabled for an indeterminate amount of time.

But, to show poise in that situation and that you have a plan is more well received by that leader rather than griping about it.

Monster Wants to Know: Out of all of Beliveau's advice, which did you find most helpful? Share with us in the comment section.